Knight_of_BAAWA:All that is.
laminustacitus:An unfalsifiable statement and ergo only metaphysics and therefore garbage.
Category error.
Knight_of_BAAWA:If you think metaphysics has failed to contribute something there, you might want to understand it as a bulwark against the idiot multi-realmers.
laminustacitus:The theory of multiple universes is
Knight_of_BAAWA:Let's scientifically enquire regarding 2 + 2 = 4.
laminustacitus:Alright let us: mathematics is an a priori science ergo 2+2=4.
Hint: just because you're a silly positivist means nothing.
Jon Irenicus:Then out the window the law of contradiction goes, because it cannot be supported by empirical evidence itself.
laminustacitus:No, empirical experince supports the law principle of contradiction. A tree can only be a tree and not also a car. A house can only be a house and not also a flag pole. Your statement makes little sense.
How are you using the word "empirical"? The law of contradiction is valid for all worlds and all times, and is a corollary of the law of identity, which you enunciated above. If you mean one requires constant empirical confirmation for one to be justified in holding to it, you're incorrect (because this confirmation is worthless and even impossible without it.) If you simply mean it captures some feature of this world, fine, but that's not the way the word is used typically in modern analytic philosophy. You're using the word "metaphysical" in a way that is rather eccentric then, because again it is taken to subsume the law of identity and contradiction.
Freedom of markets is positively correlated with the degree of evolution in any society...
Knight_of_BAAWA:Category error.
Or you're just running from reason.
Knight_of_BAAWA:I'm talking about such nonsense as the Forms and Geist.
My own use of metaphysics, in this thread, does not include them since the Forms is a theory about the nature of knowledge and the Geist is more or less a methodology of theorizing about history so I shan't critique them here.
Knight_of_BAAWA:Hint: just because you're a silly positivist means nothing.
With how I view the physical sciences some would definatly refer to me as a positivist, others would call me a hypothetico-deductivist, but, since I base my own views primarilly off of those of Karl Popper (notice my heavy insistance of falsifiability), I prefer the latter.
Knight_of_BAAWA: laminustacitus:No, empirical experince supports the law principle of contradiction. A tree can only be a tree and not also a car. A house can only be a house and not also a flag pole. Your statement makes little sense.You just made metaphysical statements. ZOMG!
I did not make a metaphysical statement; instead, I used empirical evidence to support a philosophical proposition to show its not merely metaphysics.
Jon Irenicus:If you mean one requires constant empirical confirmation for one to be justified in holding to it, you're incorrect (because this confirmation is worthless and even impossible without it).
I would say that the empirical evidence merely shows that it is apart of reality (by that I mean the world as experienced by humanity), but I would also say that such laws are very much the nature of how the world is percieved (thus "confirmation is worthless and even impossible without it") by humanity and that it is impossible that perception not include either the law of noncontradiction or the law of identity. Also, to even become ever more ecentric, I do believe that one can tacticly avoid metaphysics by not assuming that philosophical statements are about existence itself, but that they are merely apart of the world as experienced by humanity.
Jon Irenicus:You're using the word "metaphysical" in a way that is rather eccentric then, because again it is taken to subsume the law of identity and contradiction.
Keep in mind that I used metaphysics in a sense to critique an understanding of the world that could not be falsified and that ergo had no meaning in a scientific inquiry and that I have a heavy backround in physics but little in philosophy. Hopefully, I made my position more clear above, hopefully.....
Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.
- Edmund Burke
Has anybody else but 4 people attempted to answer this poster's question?
Democracy is nothing more than replacing bullets with ballots
If Pro is the opposite of Con. What is the opposite of Progress?
laminustacitus:Or you're just running from reason.
laminustacitus:My own use of metaphysics do not include them since the Forms is a theory about the nature of knowledge
laminustacitus:and the Geist is more or less a methodology of theorizing about history.
laminustacitus:With how I view the physical sciences some would definatly refer to me as a positivist, others would call me a hypothetico-deductivist, but since I base my own views primarilly off of those of Karl Popper (notice my heavy insistance of falsifiability) I prefer the latter.
Knight_of_BAAWA:You just made metaphysical statements. ZOMG!
laminustacitus:I did not make a metaphysical statement
Alas, I was wrong in my complete and total rejection of metaphysics, yet I still hold that metaphysics is useless in the fied of physical sciences; consider the debate about the utility of metaphyiscs in phiosophy conceded..
Thedesolateone:Please, are you arguing that it makes more sense that something else popped into existence then created some stuff, then created you out of it, made you live, created the whole world, divinely revealed certain seemingly random things, intervened at seemingly random points, seeing as it set the events in their inevitable motion in the first place?
See, again, you are thinking of me as some sort of defined religionist. I don't necessarily believe that God revealed any word to anyone ever, and even if God did, how the F are we supposed to know who's sheaf of paper has the correct quote? I also don't think that God had an origin, but as a non-physical entity it doesn't necessarily need one. I'm not a determinist either. You've put a lot of words in my mouth, here.